From Cowboy to Scientist: On the Life and Death of My Father, or, My Great-Grandfather Had Six Wives - Part Two: Death (rewritten)

He achieved much, he fell fast.

* * *

In a book dedicated to my father's lifetime work on epilepsy, the author quotes my father: 'The brain is like a map, but no matter how much we know of this map, there will always be more unknown than  known.'

This was typical of my father's scientific writings, so different from many scientists who publish in journals today. He was a Renaissance man who first heard classical music in college, and, with a year of taking piano lessons, he was playing Beethoven.

Years after his death, relatives would walk into a room and do a double take when they heard me play,  Beethoven's "Two Easy Sonatas".  Hearing his cadences and the way his fingers touched the keys, relatives thought it was my father,  not me, at the piano.

He first taught me to read music when I was five. He played the piano at parties upon request. There were a lot of requests. I had ample time to listen to his cadences, so attuned was I to his inner ear, his soul.

He worked vert hard. Work was his major passion. Twelve months a year with only a few weekends off, he was at work. In the lab, he prepared experiments and lectures; he taught  graduate students, medical students, dental students. At home, there were articles to write, revisions to do and edits to make.

In his spare time, he cooked. Oh, he barely knew how to turn on the range but he made the American back country favorite, Porcupines. We all relished in eating this casual dish, much as we relished the Stroganoff and Boeuf Bourguignon that I made.

We delighted in the cowboy aspects of my father as much as we were proud of him as a scientist.

He played folk guitar, the recorder and harmonica, and the violin. All self-taught as an adult. He was one intense man, a man of fiery blue eyes that followed your every move.

He had a great, old-time, folksy sense of humor, not uncommon for a man born in Utah in 1927.

At our house in a nice suburb in Montreal, we held many catered parties; usually, these were parties for the university staff and graduate students. Often, a guest of honor was included.

Once, a world-famous neurologist was the guest of honor and we had to send our beloved Lakeland terrier in a back room of the house, so insistent was she at barking at the said guest. Not infrequently did she bark at people who looked unusual. Usually, she barked only at hippies and mailmen.

Life revolved around an academic and social life. Life was like a dream.

Dreams are never made to last. This dream fell fast, hard and sudden, with a door jamb that rocked our family to hell and high water and back.

* * *

He was in Acapulco, Mexico on the first real vacation in seven years. He and my stepmother had been to the Yucatan Peninsula to see the Mayan ruins. On one particular afternoon on Saturday, December 7, 1971, my father and stepmother had been hiking in the mountains, where the scenery is otherworldly, the altitude high and the oxygen thin.

* * *

I was in my student apartment back in Montreal, at McGill. On Sunday morning, December 8,  my stepbrother knocked on my door, awakening me.

Don is gone, said he. I asked him to repeat, because I didn't quite hear him. Don is gone, he said. I kept hearing him say my father was lost until he finally said, "Don is dead."

The seconds were a blur. I ran down the hall and  screamed like a banshee, until one of my roommates said she it was OK, that she knew how I felt.  I screamed back at her, 'No, you don't. You don't know. You can't know', and she looked as if I had slapped her across the face.

The last time I had seen my father was on my 20th birthday, a few weeks earlier.

During the next few hours, I returned home, then went back downtown, where friends fed me Percodan and we watched some dumb movie, the name of which or the content of which I never actually knew, so oblivious was I to my surroundings.

I knew that this day was not the worst of grief. The worst was yet to come. This much I knew.

My stepmother was still in Mexico. She wanted the secret to be kept until she came home, a few days later.

Two days after my father's death, my youngest sister came home from school, and asked simply: "Is it true?"

I knew that someone had told her.

The young son of one of my parents' colleagues had overheard the news, a boy too young to keep it to himself.

So the three of us -- my stepbrother, my youngest sister and I kept the secret from my middle sister.  In our house, secrets were  gold,  more valuable than anything else.

So repressed we were in our grief, going about our daily lives as if it had not happened: Our hair and our home were tidy -  the gloss of our life was a perfect, shining veneer over our inner lives that were so fragile and our hearts were like jelly, that the veneer could break with the slightest provocation and send our souls into chaos.

In Poland, when someone died, people would joke about the bureaucracy in Poland and say, 'at least, it's not Mexico.'

My stepmother was alone in Mexico after my father died  and she did not speak Spanish. So suspicious were the authorities, they needed to question her about foul play.

She was beside herself with grief. She managed to telephone a doctor in Mexico City, a former student of my father, who arranged for an elderly lady to sit with my stepmother, while he made the appropriate arrangements with the Mexican authorities. He paid them off. It is the only way, in Mexico. The person left standing at an automobile accident is arrested. If you are ever in an automobile accident in Mexico, there is only one thing to do: get out.

In the months and years that followed there were nights of my stepmother's Seconal and alcohol, so much so she couldn't sleep, then so much she couldn't awaken. One day, the lit cigarette she'd been smoking fell and torched the daybed, as she slept and nearly set the basement on fire.

We quashed the fire, tossed the ruined daybed and did not call 911. We knew enough not to call the authorities, when it was something we could handle ourselves.

There were nights my stepmother railed in hysterics and anger at my father -  how could he, she'd said, leave her to pick up this mess, of dying intestate with four children to take care of, three of whom were not even her own children.

It was December in Montreal; the snow lay two feet thick on the ground. Ice was everywhere. There would be no funeral until summer when my father's mother could travel.

My stepmother kept the urn in her room, as if it were a comfort to her.

Of all this, I felt numb. I wrote poetry about my father, for him to wake from his sleep, to come to dinner at the empty placesetting waiting for him, to rise from his ashes like a phoenix.

Anything at all, just to come back. Grief is like this, it knows no limits of absurdity. It searches everywhere and begs.

I nearly lost my mind imagining him in that urn: no form or body, just ash.

Then there was the six months of waiting, of being barely able to breathe or sleep, until the funeral. June seemed years away.  Time drips slowly when you grieve.

I walked down the street, and on every streeet corner it was as if I saw my father walking ahead of me. That tousled, grey hair,  that slouch - all of it seemed to beckon, stir up my subconscious and shout, 'it's him, he's there, it's not true he's dead, he is alive.'

When people would ask about my father, I replied: 'He died.' As if by using the past tense, it could render the past no longer true, as if something that had happened is no longer true. 'He's dead' had such a sharp, staccato finality that I could not bear to speak those words.

June 22, 1972 ,  the day of the funeral, was sunny and warm.
The cemetery on Mount Royal had recently been redone, complete with street signs and grassy knolls. Birds chirped and a gentle fragrance hung in the air.

I had bought a black dress and pumps for the occasion. I changed my name from Kira to Kathryn. There was comfort, real comfort, however small, in being together with the extended family for the funeral. My father's mother, aged as she was, was there to bury her child, her only child to have graduated from college.

My father's two sisters were there, too, having made the trip from New Mexico and California.

Through all this, I never shed a tear. I was numb to the death of the man from whom I had learned everything.  For the next two decades, I went through the motions, resolved to carry on his work in science. Not as a scientist, but as someone who knew how important he was, and what a loss for society his death was.

I finished college and grad school, settled down and got married. I had been raised an atheist, yet I always felt a pull toward Catholicism. I decided to become a Catholic and enrolled at The Paulist Center, in Boston. This was in 1992.

It was during the religious conversion process when we read Scripture and related the words passage to our lives that the floodgates of grief finally opened: tears flowed and would not stop. In front of a dozen people I was, and still the tears rolled down my cheeks.

I had learned so much from my father - how he had died so that I could learn from his mistakes, his successes, his life.

It was then that I finally let go to rejoice at being alive.

*

This was first published in January, 2006.

Part One:From Cowboy to Scientist: On the Life and Death of My Father, or, my great-grandfather had six wives - Part One -- Life (rewritten)